


Requirements of Gracious Hospitality

by jenna_thorn



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 11:49:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3976969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What no one knew was that Josephine had started planning the victory celebration before Corypheus fell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requirements of Gracious Hospitality

What no one knew was that Josephine had started planning the victory celebration before Corypheus fell. Since they’d found Skyhold, ever since she understood in her heart that this whole business would not end easily, she’d used it as a distraction, a way to turn her mind from the incessant demands of first building the inquisition, then supplying it with allies and soldiers, cloth and leather, metal and herbs, through to planning a war on an enemy she could scarcely comprehend. Between assassination attempts and rescues and dragon hunts, she plotted out menus, drew guest lists, considered caterers, meticulously compared swatches for banners and bunting. The notes for it sat on her board, on a page second from the bottom, in the simplest of code. 

The bottom page was much like the second, carefully balanced menus representing the diversity of the Inquisition, lists of people and their most recent location, outlines for speeches filled with sacrifice and valor. The speeches on both pages, like the menus, were quite similar, one to another. 

For funerals also required guest lists and laden boards of bread and wines, representing the individuals who walked to that battle, floated above the ground itself, crashed through tales to become legends. 

Josephine leaned against the familiar stone, the empty throne to her right, the Undercroft behind her, the Inquisitor making her way through the crowd of friends and allies and observers to her left. She pulled both sheets, anticipation for celebration and preparation for mourning, years of fear and hope and planning, always planning, for both possible outcomes, but not all possible, for oh, total annihilation needed no invitations, and funerals were a luxury for survivors, not the dead themselves. They had come so very close to having no one to dig graves, let alone bury, to being swept aside in a black flood of evil, with no one left to mourn. 

She crumpled both pages together, folding them on one another, and dropped them in the nearest flame, heedless of the waste. These pages would not be scraped for reuse; this page turned now.


End file.
